


Fearless

by Delphi



Category: Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Crossdressing, Drama, Gender Issues, M/M, Sexual Identity, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-04-22
Updated: 2003-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-05 16:40:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ezra takes a good look at himself. Set during <i>Working Girls</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fearless

Behind the glass is something like a woman. Something sweet.

It shifts modestly under his scrutiny. Sweaty and uncertain, half-dressed in off-white linens. Nameless. Mute.

It pouts with a harlot's red lips. Its cheeks and eyelids are powdered and painted. A dab of lavender scent pulses at its throat. It curves...its figure convincingly caged inside a whalebone corset. It has pretty, pale skin.

It smiles, and Ezra Standish smiles back.

He can feel the paint cracking on his lips. Not for the first time, his tongue darts out to taste it. It tastes like scarlet, sweet and bitter.

Again, he glances over his shoulder towards the shuttered window. He takes a step back, and his reflection retreats. He trails his hand along the whalebone ridges, then down to where he's hard beneath the petticoat.

Behind the glass is a sliver of Ezra's room. His bed, and the purple dress laid out like a virgin on her wedding night. The wig is propped on the bedpost like a pelt. Ezra's hair is matted, and he suspects he hasn't found the last of the wig-pins. Stripped of the dress, the illusion of his shape is revealed for just that.

He will never make a beautiful woman; he knows that now. He can't quite decide if what he feels is relief or disappointment. His shoulders are too broad, his jaw too square. His brow has a certain set that saves him from being too pretty.

But they looked at him today. The men.

In the tents of Wickestown, they looked at him hungrily, a few not unkindly. Those that put down their drinks and smoothed back their hair as if there were a little more on their minds that what lay beneath Ezra's skirts—or what was meant to be there. They looked at him without the hate and anger they saved for young men they found a mite too fetching.

They wanted him, and they weren't ashamed.

His fingers fumble on the buttons of the petticoat. It falls around his ankles along with the crumpled stockings. He regards this change critically. His legs, like his arms, are too well-muscled. The outline of his cock is obvious through his drawers.

His palm ghosts across silk. It wasn't just the Wickestown men who looked at him.

He takes a step back to sit at the foot of the bed. Knees spread, he thinks of the two girls who attended him, Minnie and Eleanor. Their pinches and giggles hadn't been entirely innocent. They'd called him pretty, and Eleanor had kissed the excess paint from his mouth.

He imagines the three of them together and the tangle of pretty underthings on the floor. The thought is sweet enough, and he watches as his reflection slides its hand into its drawers.

But admiring looks from women, he's received often enough. It's the men that make him itch.

Buck now, Buck joshed him with wolf-whistles, and Nathan and Vin didn't say much of anything but laughed when JD took off his hat. Chris had that hard, angry look in his eye. And Josiah...

Maybe Josiah looked at him the way a man looks at a woman. Or maybe that's just the way he always looks at Ezra. That long lazy gaze of his that slides right down Ezra's body and takes its sweet time crawling its way back up. Fearless.

Josiah's words taunt him, haunt him: Things always look better in their natural state.

He wonders if Josiah really believes that. He wonders if Josiah would look at him the same way in homespun and scuffed boots. He wonders how Josiah would look at his naked body.

He tries to wipe the paint from his lips and succeeds only in smearing it across his mouth. A strange young man glares accusingly at him from behind the glass. He looks foolish. Disgusting.

Ezra closes his eyes and falls back on the bed. He touches himself angrily, thinking of himself on the stage and Josiah in the audience, his painted mouth, his pretty clothes, Josiah's hands, Josiah's voice, Josiah's eyes.

He wishes he could be fearless too.


End file.
